Regarding Missing Comments At The Minnesota Public Radio Climate Change Blog

######################UPDATE 2 (11-5-09): It’s Thursday and six days have gone by since MPR emptied its spam filter and released my original comment. Paul Huttner responded to it.

I then posted three replies to Paul. The first advised him that I had revised the title of my post, eliminating the word censor, and had updated the version of the post here at my website. My second comment advised him that the first of my most recent comments was stuck in the spam filter again, just like the original one. And the third was a detailed response to Paul’s reply to my original comment. Only the second of my three comments made it past the spam filter.

That leaves the other two still in there, floating in the limbo of the MPR spam filter.

He replied, “I'n [sic] not an IT guy, so I don't know why you would get that message. I will be happy to forward it to those who would know.”

Then later Ken Paulman, Managing Editor for Online News at MPR, added, “The missing comments were indeed being caught up in a spam filter. I've released the unpublished comments and they should be visible on the site now.
“The comments that didn't post had a large number of hyperlinks - suspect that's why the filter didn't like them.
“Paul does not screen comments beforehand.”

The comments do now appear on the webpage, and in response to Paul Huttner’s request,”Would you please remove or change your incorrect blog post headline below?” I have changed the post title.

The new title of the post is, "Regarding Missing Comments At The Minnesota Public Radio Climate Change Blog."

The post begins with, “The numbers are in, and it looks like the "global cooling" theory just melted away.” It has the requisite link to the typical news release (Seth Borenstein’s (AP) article “Statistics experts reject global cooling claims”) and a two-year-old GISS Annual Global Temperature Anomaly Graph, even though a graph of current data would have better helped his cause. But what struck me and caused me to comment there was, first, Huttner’s use of the Climate Change Attribution graph…

http://i39.tinypic.com/2s0o2uo.jpg
…which he wrongly attributes to Kerry Emanuel, and, second, his projection that 2010 could be the warmest on record while hinting that ENSO would ultimately be responsible for it.

I felt obligated to advise him of his error in attribution of the graph and of the fact that the Climate Change Attribution graph uses outdated TSI data. I also reinforced the ENSO-global climate link over the past decade by quoting from Knight et al (2009), but noting that Knight et al make an error in their assumption that the relationship between ENSO and global temperature is linear. Here’s what I wrote:
############
Paul Huttner: A few things. You attribute the Climate Change Attribution graph to Kerry Emanuel, but it’s actually from Global Warming Art:http://www.globalwarmingart.com/wiki/Image:Climate_Change_Attribution_png

So there hasn't been the anticipated rise in global temperature because, after you remove the effects of ENSO, the trend is zero. Therefore, if this year is a record year, it should be attributable to ENSO, not AGW.

6 comments:

John
said...

Hi Bob -

When Knight et al say that the models take into account internal variability and thus these type of decades can be anticipated and are included in the models, do you have any idea what type of internal variability they are talking about?

He separates out ENSO ... what else could he be referring to?

I've heard it many times that the models anticipate stable or even decreasing decades, but I've never understood how they do it, absent a negative external forcing like aerosols or whatever.

I notice from the Svaalgard reconstruction that we are at a minimum now. This doesn't change any arguments about ENSO influences, etc, but if we were at a maximum instead of a minimum, would we see current temperatures about .1c higher (which would push SST to "record" highs), perhaps lending strength to the AGW view that this decade is merely a "respite" from warming? That the solar minimum is masking increased forcing from co2?

A .1c varation in a decade is half of what they'd expect from co2 forcing, right?

But wouldn't they take these solar variations into account for the models for the 2000-2010 period? I don't remember anyone saying "oh, the slight variation in solar cycle is what is creating the flat temperatures."

Thanks again, as always. I appreciate being able to use you as a sounding board - your knowledge obviously vastly outweighs mine.

John: Sorry for the delay. You asked, “When Knight et al say that the models take into account internal variability and thus these type of decades can be anticipated and are included in the models, do you have any idea what type of internal variability they are talking about?”

ENSO and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation.

The AMO has a 50- to 80-year cycle so they can anticipate it within a few decades. ENSO also has an underlying multidecadal cycle, but I don’t recall it being discussed in papers about how GCMs address ENSO. Most of those papers assume that NINO3.4 SST anomalies and the frequency of El Nino events will increase this century, even though the NINO3.4 SST anomaly trend line is flat in the 20th Century (and now declining).

In your next comment you asked, “I notice from the Svaalgard reconstruction that we are at a minimum now. This doesn't change any arguments about ENSO influences, etc, but if we were at a maximum instead of a minimum, would we see current temperatures about .1c higher (which would push SST to ‘record’ highs), perhaps lending strength to the AGW view that this decade is merely a ‘respite’ from warming? That the solar minimum is masking increased forcing from co2?”

First, the record highs existed in only one SST dataset, the NCDC’s ERSST.v3b. The NCDC’s OI.v2 and the Hadley Centre’s HADSST2 and HADISST did not reach records this year in terms of SST or SST anomalies. Second, the estimates of the impact of the solar cycle vary, as does the time lags associated with it. Estimates of the impact of the “average” solar cycle as it goes from minimum to maximum on global temperature vary from ~0.07 to 0.15 deg C. And the estimates of the time lags depend on what medium is being measured. The lag in the change in temperature over land to a change in the solar cycle is usually measured in terms of a few months, but over the ocean, due to thermal inertia, the lag varies per study from a few years to a few decades. If the solar cycle stays an extended time at minimum, global temperatures would “remain” at a lower temperature (after all of the lags); temperatures would not continue to drop, and drop, and drop more the longer the sun stays at minimum.

You asked, “A .1c varation in a decade is half of what they'd expect from co2 forcing, right? A .1c varation in a decade is half of what they'd expect from co2 forcing, right?”

Right, assuming the projected rise over a century is 2 deg C and that climate models have a basis in reality, which they do not from all that I’ve seen, but the IPCC as you know provides wide variations in those projections.

You asked, “But wouldn't they take these solar variations into account for the models for the 2000-2010 period?”

But a solar cycle varies in length from 9 to 13 years, so over a decade it would pretty much be the mean; that is, half the time we’re on the up slope and on the other half we’re on the down slope.

You asked, “Or I am off because, if it's a steady anomaly, the variation down from past would have cancelled out the variation up now, making overall anomalies unimpacted?”

I’m not sure in what context you’re using “steady anomaly”, but over a decade, the upward part of the cycle cancels out the downward part.

Comment Policy, SST Posts, and Notes

Comments that are political in nature or that have nothing to do with the post will be deleted.####The Smith and Reynolds SST Posts DOES NOT LIST ALL SST POSTS. I stopped using ERSST.v2 data for SST when NOAA deleted it from NOMADS early in 2009.

Please use the search feature in the upper left-hand corner of the page for posts on specific subjects.####NOTE: I’ve discovered that some of the links to older posts provide blank pages. While it’s possible to access that post by scrolling through the history, that’s time consuming. There’s a quick fix for the problem, so if you run into an absent post, please advise me. Thanks.####If you use the graphs, please cite or link to the address of the blog post or this website.